Maker Monday: Quarantine Cooking - Japanese Milk Bread Experimentation

 

During our 2021-2022 COVID Quarantine, we've been experimenting with bread making. We did sourdough, molasses breads, wheat breads, and what has become one of our favorite go-to options, Japanese Milk Bread. Unlike something like the Sourdoughs, which can be an all day process, the milk bread is something I can put together during my lunch or afternoon break and have ready before supper. It is a quick and easy bread, and so FLUFFY! 

I happened upon the base recipe I've included below on the Savor Easy YouTube Channel. The original recipe is designed to either be made into one large loaf or three mini loaves of bread. We have played with the portions a lot as we've experimented, and we've used this recipe to make 8 fluffy brat buns (not pretty, but very tasty!) or 6 large hamburger style buns (we probably could have went 8 on these as well and will next time). I would like to try them out as smaller dinner rolls as well. Every variation we've tried has turned out very well so far.

Tips: If you live in the upper Mid-west like we do (or your house just tends to be on the colder side), we have a sure method for properly proofed bread. My favorite is using the Yogurt setting on my electric pressure cooker. If  you do this, DO NOT use the pressure lid on the unit. If your bread rises to the top of your pressure cooker insert, it can clog the steam valve making your cooker think it is at full pressure. Some units have a safety feature that they will not let you open them unless the pressure has been released. It becomes nearly impossible to get the lid off and clean again. Leave the regular lid off and cover it with either a glass lid or even just a dinner place. Something to hold the warmth in.

This week, we have a dilemma. We are out of sandwich bread. My wife and I both tend to prefer wheat bread with whole grains in general. I made a loaf or two  earlier in the summer, but they came out super dense. I wasn't super happy with the texture overall even if the flavor was good. We love the fluffiness of the milk bread, but we want the crunch of the whole grains and oats. So, I'm frankensteining a recipe and hoping for the best today. The original recipe calls for three cups of all purpose flour. In today's batch, I opted for two cups all purpose and one cup whole wheat. I sifted it together to hopefully achieve a bit more fluffiness from the wheat flour. I also added in half a cup of  Bob's Red Mill Hot Cereal, 10 Grain, Whole Grain. Because I added the extra grains, I put in about two tablespoons of extra milk when I added my wet ingredients to my dry ingredients. I divided the dough in half and used half of it to make one artisan sized loaf of bread. The other half got further divided to make six dinner rolls. I cooked the dinner rolls for 14 minutes and the loaf for 19 minutes. They turned out beautifully. The taste and the texture were spot on for what we wanted. The only thing we might change next time is to add a bit more salt.

Super Soft Milk Bread Loaf

Ingredients:

o    1 cup warm milk

o    1 tablespoon sugar

o    2 teaspoons dry active yeast

o    3 cups all-purpose flour (plus 1/3 to 1/2 cup for kneading)

o    1/4 cup sugar

o    1 teaspoon salt

o    1 large egg

o    1/3 cup melted butter

o    2 tablespoons of oil (for your hands while kneading)

o    Egg wash (1 egg and 1 tablespoon of milk)

 

Directions:

First, mix your yeast, sugar, and milk in a cup and let it stand for 10 minutes, till yeast is fully bloomed. Then, you will add all of the dry ingredients to the yeast mixture to form the dough.

Turn dough out onto floured surface and lightly oil top to prevent stickage. Knead for approximately 10 minutes until dough is smooth and elastic.

Form dough into ball and place in oiled bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Let rise until doubled in size (about 1 hour). Uncover and punch down dough.

Take out of bowl and form into either one large loaf or three small loaves. Watch tutorial video on how to create the swirl loaves (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1vSF67A7lg). Place in lightly oiled loaf pan and cover with plastic wrap (you can line bottom of loaf pan with parchment paper to decrease chance of sticking while baking). Let rise for approximately 30 minutes.

Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius or 355 degrees Fahrenheit.

Brush tops of loaf/loaves with egg wash.

Bake for 18-20 minutes.

Maker Monday: For the Love of Southern Biscuits

 

I have been on a journey for fluffy, soft biscuits like I ate (and made) when I lived in Alabama for years now. I grew up making biscuits with my grandmother and mother on an almost weekly basis. I love home made biscuits. When I moved out on my own, I made them less often, but I still enjoyed having fresh biscuits for breakfast or supper occasionally. I move all over the southeast U.S. when I was in college, and there didn't seem to be any change in my baking abilities. I moved to Minnesota in 2005, and it's like I instantly lost my abilities to make decent biscuits. It is the weirdest thing I have ever experienced.

Over the past 15 years I have tried dozens of biscuit recipes. I have tried different milk fat contents of dairy products. I have tried all different kinds of locally available flour. I have even tried carbonating water and then added powdered buttermilk to it. Cold butter, warm butter, crisco, lard. All the kinds of fats. You name it, I've tried it. Every time, I got flat, dense, not at all fluffy or flaky biscuits. 

WTF?! I used to make good biscuits with easy. I was stumped as to what the deal was. I did a lot of research. I read a lot of blogs, cooking magazines, and cooking books to try and figure it out. I just happened along an article about White Lily flour that lit a bulb above my head. I had always made biscuits with White Lily before moving to Minnesota. I haven't been able to find it here. The While Lily flour sold in the South is made from a winter wheat that is a softer flour than the kinds sold here in the Midwest. It has more protein in the flour, and that makes a different for lift and mouth feel. Who knew? It wasn't just me forgetting how to make proper biscuits. I put it on my list to stock up on flour the next time I traveled home to visit family.

In the mean time, COVID-19 happened, and everyone was doing a lot more experimental baking than normal. I fell down the YouTube rabbit hole and happened upon a video of a woman making biscuits with yeast (here is the video). I had never seen anyone put yeast in biscuits, so I was interested in giving it a a try. These were based on a recipe called Angel Biscuits printed in Southern Living magazine in I believe the 50s. No special flour needed. I had to give them a try.

You proof the yeast to add to your dry biscuit ingredients and then left the dough proof for at least two hours. Other than that, the process is pretty much just like any other biscuit recipe. One batch made a standard cake pan of regular sized biscuits and another 8x8 baker of mini biscuits. They turned out so beautiful! Golden and buttery on the outside, fluffy and soft on the inside. 

They were a tiny bit more yeasty tasting than I want in a biscuit. We had let the dough proof overnight, so next time I will just do the minimum two hour poof to see if that makes a different in taste. Despite that one tiny opinional flaw, these have been the best biscuits we have baked in the last 15 years. Mission accomplished! They were perfect to pair with sausage gravy and scrambled eggs for breakfast.

If you've found this first recipe interesting, please look for another post coming soon on my re-do of my family's classic White Lily biscuits. I recently visited my mother and did a grocery delivery of some of my favorite regional items that I could bring home with me to Minnesota. One of those was a small stock of White Lily flour.

Maker Monday: Quarantine Cooking - Sourdough Bread

 If you have been reading my blog posts all along the way, you may remember I played around with beginning a sourdough starter a while back. I'm at it again. With the Covid-19 pandemic and the stay-at-home orders and hoarding of supplies, yeast is very hard to find. So, I decided to revive my sourdough starter and make some loaves of sourdough bread.

I will fully admit to going through several bread recipes and bread making techniques before I found one I liked. There were a few meh but edible loaves of bread and a couple of total fails. I am going to say that it was probably a combination of user error and our house being a bit too cold for the bread to rise properly. I do not think it was any fault of the recipe.

The recipe that did end up working without a hitch, was the How To Make Sourdough Bread from the Kitchn website. Be forewarned, making sourdough bread is at least an all day process, and most realistically a two day process for best flavor.

Two sourdough loaves ready to go in the fridge for a final rest (because I did not want to stay up another 4-5 hours to finish them that night). I started this around 1pm, and I did not anticipate just how long it would take before being ready to go in the oven. It's right there in the recipe, but I guess I got ahead of myself. It is quite an involved process of work the dough and wait, work the dough and wait again.

Baking is a true labor of love. I have utmost respect for those who bake every week for their families. If your mom, dad, spouse, SO, best friend, neighbor bakes for you, give them a hug and a thank you. It’s a multi day commitment. I now understand so much better why so many Southerners where I grew up have cornbread or biscuits on a daily basis and reserve the rolls and breads for more special occasions.

Baking sourdough is kind of interesting in comparison to other breads I have made. I got to bring out both of my cast iron dutch ovens (my kitchen one and my camping one) for this endeavor. The sourdough needs the initial build up of steam achieved from cooking in a very hot, lidded pot in order for the dough to rise up instead of out. You pre-heat both your oven and your pots to a high temperature, put the loaves in and keep the oven at that high temp for a short amount of time. Then you lower the temperature for the rest of the bake. I think attempting to cook my first loaf last week as more of a baguette style was why it failed. It didn't have that spike of high steamy heat to help it rise up, so it spread instead and ended up flat and dense. Don't freak out too much if you get some smoke too with this method. You line the dutch oven with parchment paper, and as the oven heats up the parchment paper will char and smoke. As soon as you put the pots in to pre-heat, I would suggest turning on your exhaust fan and possibly opening a window. It got very smoky, very quick.


The cooking process completed beautifully with no problems at all. Here is a picture of the sourdough loaves when they finished cooking. They are beautiful. Everything rose as it was supposed to.I wanted to immediately do a victory dance of happiness when I pulled them out of my dutch ovens.

We tasted a slice. Oh my gosh. It's so good. They were crispy and flavorful on the outside and soft and chewy on the inside with jut the right amount of tang. Just a little punch of the sourdough taste and smell. Now I want to make smaller versions of these to use as bread bowls for beer cheese soup.

In my vintage wooden breadbox, these lasted us about two weeks. The sliced bread made phenomenal tuna melts. We had quite a few lunches using them for sandwiches. They were good for just snacking on with a little bit of softened butter as well. 

If you are wondering what to do with all of your left over starter, King Arthur Flour has a great list of recipes that all use what is discarded when you feed your sourdough starter. Some recipes use a half cup to a cup of starter, and others use as little as a tablespoon. So many to choose from! Check out those recipes HERE. We have made the sourdough pancakes, and next we are going to try the crumpets.